Author and editor Toby Miller will deliver the eighth annual Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture at York next month where he’ll explore the environmental aspects of the media and the history of media as sources of environmental risk in his talk, titled “Talking Rubbish”.
The Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture, Thursday, Oct. 2 at 6pm in York’s Price Family Cinema, Room 102, Accolade East Building, Keele campus, will be filmed by Television Ontario as part of its Big Ideas lecture series.
A professor at the University of California Riverside (UCR) and director of its film and visual culture program, Miller will draw on work by journalist and author Ioan Davies, a York professor from 1972 to 2000, to raise questions about the media’s environmental impact through electronic waste. He will also discuss whether discourse should be limited in the name of environmental responsibility rather than endlessly expanded in the name of democracy.
Left: Toby Miller
Cross-appointed to the Departments of English, Sociology and Women’s Studies at UCR, Miller is the author of Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neo-Liberal Age (Temple University Press, 2006), The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (John Hopkins University Press, 1993) and The Avengers (British Film Institute, 1998). He is the editor of Cultural Policy (Sage Publishing, 2002) and the journal Television & New Media and co-editor of Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Sage Publishing, 1998) and the journal Social Identities. All together, Miller has written or edited over 20 books. His research interests include media, sport, labour, gender, race, citizenship, politics and cultural policy via political economy.
After working in broadcasting, banking and civil service, Miller became an academic in the late 1980s when cultural studies was really starting to take off and was able to parlay a combination of his work experience, theoretical interests and political commitments into a new career. He has taught media and cultural studies across the humanities and social sciences at the University of New South Wales, Griffith University, Murdoch University and NYU.
The 
Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture commemorates the life and work of Ioan Davies (right), who explored art and popular culture in terms of the kinds of opportunities they offer for common political action. Davies was the founder of the journal border/lines and author of several works of fiction and non-fiction, including Cultural Studies and Beyond: Fragments of Empire (Routledge, 1995), Writers in Prison (Blackwell, 1990) and Social Mobility and Political Change (Pall Mall, 1970). Davies taught graduate courses on aesthetics and contemporary critical theory in the Department of Social & Political Thought in York’s Faculty of Art and was influential in establishing the African Studies Program and the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture.
Each year, the Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture Series brings prominent international thinkers to York to present their views on culture, democracy and society in changing global contexts.
For more information, contact Aimee Roy at roya1@yorku.ca or 416-707-8750.